In front is a number above each box, and at the back of the box is the duplicate number with the name of the person to whom it belongs. They are hired for a season, and cost seven and a half to eight guineas a night on the grand tier. These boxes hold four people, and are usually let for ten or twelve weeks: generally for two nights a weeks to each set of people. Thus the total cost of one of the best boxes for the season is, roughly speaking, from one hundred and fifty, to one hundred and eighty guineas for two nights a week.
At the theatre Queen Alexandra dresses even more simply than at the opera. In winter her gown is often filled in with lace to the neck. She is always a quiet, but a perfect dresser. Never in the fashion, yet always of the fashion, she avoids all exaggerations, moderates her skirts and her sleeves, and yet has just enough of the dernier cri about them to make them up to date. She probably never wore a big picture hat in her life, and prefers a small bonnet with strings, to a toque.
Royalty thoroughly enjoy themselves at the play. They laugh and chat between the acts, and no one applauds more enthusiastically than King Edward VII. and his beautiful Queen. They use their opera-glasses freely, nod to their friends, and thoroughly enter into the spirit of the evening’s entertainment.
CHAPTER XIV
SCENE-PAINTING AND CHOOSING A PLAY
Novelist—Dramatist—Scene-painter—An Amateur Scenic Artist—Weedon Grossmith to the Rescue—Mrs. Tree’s Children—Mr. Grossmith’s Start on the Stage—A Romantic Marriage—How a Scene is built up—English and American Theatres Compared—Choosing a Play—Theatrical Syndicate—Three Hundred and Fifteen Plays at the Haymarket.
A NOVELIST describes the surroundings of his story. He paints in words, houses, gardens, dresses, anything and everything to heighten the picture and show up his characters in a suitable frame.
The dramatist cannot do this verbally; but he does it in fact. He definitely decides the style of scene necessary for each act, and draws out elaborate plans to achieve that end. It is the author who interviews the scene-painter, talks matters over with the costume-artist, the dressmaker, and the upholsterer. It is the author who generally chooses the cretonnes and the wall-papers—that is to say, the more important authors invariably do. Mr. Pinero, Mr. W. S. Gilbert, and Captain Robert Marshall design their own scenes to the minutest detail, but then all three of them are capable artists and draughtsmen themselves.
Scene-painting seems easy until one knows something about its difficulties. To speak of a small personal experience—when we got up those theatricals in Harley Street, mentioned in a previous chapter, my father told me I must paint the scenery, to which I gaily agreed. Having an oil painting on exhibition at the Women Artists’, I felt I could paint scenery without any difficulty.